ISP for On-Line Gaming

Kenny@Denny

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Son of K @ D spends much time playing World of Warcraft on-line and complains very much about lag [:(]. He and others are of the opinion that our ISP (Orange) is to blame and they are one of the worst for lag.
Are there any gamers out there with a lag free life? What ISP should I change to if any? I'm thinking of trying Zen because the contracts are only for 1 month.


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BOGEY

I use a smaller company - VISPA.

They are very good as you get a service that does exactly what it says on the tin. There are no download limits or port-throttling.

I suspect that Port Throttling will be the biggest problem with your Orange connection. SOOOO many ISPs use this technique now even when they say you have 'Unlimited' bandwidth. What this really means is that you can surf the net all you like all day long (i.e. using the port that Internet Explorer uses - port 88), but when it comes to games they restrict the ports (i.e. the game may use port 12345, but it will only have a minimal bandwidth - probably worse than a 56k modem).

Hope that makes sense.

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StefanH

There are 3 candidates, Zen Internet, BT and Fusion Media Networks. They are listed in order of preference, not price!

Zen will give you a fantastic service and great speeds for online gaming. However, they have (on their home service) a 50GB monthly cap, after which you can buy 1GB for œ1. Monthly contract as well, so you can jump ship at any time. If I could afford their Office Max product, I'd be on it (because it has no limits).

BT Option 3 will throttle your connection if you download more than 175GB a month. This isn't documented anywhere (that I could find) but I still have the email from BT which states this. If you phone them up and ask them, they will tell you that you can download 400GB+ without issues. They lie.

Fusion Media Networks are the <i>very last</i> ISP offering a truly unlimited service (for less than œ80 monthly). I'm with them and they're great. They are a much smaller company than Zen, but their service has been completely rock solid for the past 8 months and only had a few minor problems previous to that. <b>It's a 1 year contract though</b>, so you'll have to be prepared to commit.

hsa

No problems with BT for about 2 years. I would consider my area low-ratio though. 175GB to me is a fantastic amount of data. The most I've ever been to is 50GB with Azureus and eMule running permanently.

What are the WoW servers like? We all get problems with latency on servers overseas, crowded servers or just poor server providers. Some copmpanies are better than others. When I play BF2 I tend to go for UK servers or servers with a sub 50 ping.

I have heard bad things about Ornage for awhile now though.

Kenny@Denny

Thanks all. Have told Orange that I'll be terminating the contract. Son of K @ D will be paying the œ100 penalty and any additional monthly charge to new ISP! Who said students are poor?

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